


It's Obvious

by Annorledes



Category: Guiding Light
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-22
Updated: 2016-11-22
Packaged: 2018-09-01 13:54:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8627056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Annorledes/pseuds/Annorledes
Summary: A companion piece to These Memories Can't Wait. A little further on, and from a different perspective.





	

This is a strange time in my life. Not so very long ago at all my mind was made up by the things they had told me were sacred. Building blocks made of Right and Good held together tightly by the holy glue of words so infinitely mysterious they had to be the Truth. And now it has cracked open and the bricks lie shattered on the floor of this house. This house where I'm wide awake an hour before dawn on this spring morning, listening to the calm and steady rhythm of your breathing. In the bed that used to be mine and is ours now. Your hand is in mine. Flesh and bone, strong fingers, soft skin and bitten pink nails. You are transparent, the proof of hot red blood is visible through the pale blue ridges of your veins. I lean in closer and I swear I can hear your heartbeats. They are real.

So very strange that only a little while ago you were hiding from me, in plain sight but still hiding. You slipped away like water through my fingers each time I tried to hold on to you. Your smiles had stopped being broad grins that could light up an arena full of people, they had turned into sad imitations that sometimes, less and less often, flew hastily across your lips. Like that day when it had finally become so messed up that I was crying in our kitchen. You comforted me, like you always do, but your mind was someplace else. Still, you were there, more than anyone had ever been. My best friend with the shoulder to cry on. My love.

Those sacred things. The sanctity of marriage. The sacred union of a man and a woman, that's what I said to you that day when it all had started to come apart. But no big truth can be built on lies. And what happened between me and Frank could never be considered sacred or true. I felt that the whole time on that narrow, awful-smelling sofa. God was untypically and painfully absent and I was left with my exploding head and the unbearable sounds of his pleasure. I wasn't able to shut it out. When it was over he kissed my cheek but I turned my head away as far as I dared, couldn't stand his lips, his demanding breath on my face. Couldn't look into those pale puppy eyes and see the slippery adoration there. That's the one thing you two have in common, that I can see through you both. He didn't notice, he just sighed happily and pulled my stiff body closer. Later I mustered up the courage to tell him it was over. Believing too much in other people's lies can make it hard to tell the truth, I thought cryptically to myself. He wasn't making it easier either, cause he didn't get it. How could he not get it?

I cringe a little, I don't want to think about that anymore. Instead I close my eyes and focus my other senses on you being near me, being here with me. Your body is solid and warm and strong beneath my free hand resting on your hipbone. A flashing image from before we fell asleep last night, the image of you inside me, makes my heart skip a beat to make its presence known. I don't blush though, not anymore. It's too late for embarrassment, for keeping up appearances. I'm new. You have torn me down and built me up again, complete with Right and Good and holy words of love and profanity whispered through my ears. It's so obvious.

The day after that first night it must have been written on my face and all over my body. The new truth, in plain language. We went to Company to get take-out that day since the fridge was empty and you can't survive on love alone. The air between us was still crackling and sparkling. I looked at your profile while we sat there in the middle of the dinner crowd waiting for our food, and I could see the ghosts of my kisses spreading in meandering patterns down your jawline and on your cheek. You looked back at me then and smiled so brightly it made your fingerprints on my body burn and glow. Why didn't anybody notice them glowing?

The day after that, I went to church for the first time in a long time. The hall was very quiet and reverberantly empty. For a place so sacred, it was suddenly so disturbingly naked. I frowned at my own thoughts, these strange new thoughts that kept popping up in familiar situations like this. But again, it was a strange time in my life and everything was new. I found Father Ray in the sacristy, bent over his holy words like always. We talked for a while about the things we always talk about, and I impressed myself with the normal tone of my voice, in spite of everything. Still, he looked at me in an odd way, like he could see my thoughts and the evidence of my actions. Perhaps it was that he was a God's man that made him that sensitive, I thought, and excused myself pretty quickly. When I got home I looked in the mirror and started laughing. There it was, the sign, the modest cause behind the Father's weird behaviour: a fairly pronounced hickey, angry red against the white skin on the side of my neck.

I open my eyes again, it seems impossible to go back to sleep this morning. You have turned your head up towards me in your sleep and a lock of your shiny hair has fallen across your face. I stroke it gently and smile as I notice the green dots left in it from the art making you engaged in with Emma yesterday afternoon, after that astonishing and very clarifying conversation. She wanted to paint, as usual. You wanted to take the edge off. You told me you needed a martini, but I sat you down at the kitchen table next to her instead and put a brush in your hand. You really need to drink less of those martinis. I really got it though. All the nerves, the anxious anticipation. What if she isn't old enough to understand this? What if she's too old to understand this? What if she's been imprinted already with the old Good and Right and True?

Her eyes were big and round and the exact same colour as yours. I don't know how many times that fact has crossed my mind by now. They held a genuine, childlike and yet very mature concern as you and I took turns stuttering ourselves through the birds and the bees. You were in the middle of explaining why grownups who are in love want to share a bed, without really explaining anything, when she impatiently interrupted:  
”Mom, I KNOW all that. I'm not five!”  
That wondrous enigma of a child. Our wondrous enigma of a child. To her this was just another reduntant parental lecture that kept her away from the really important things she needed to do. You glanced at me and then got to the point, knowing that it would be impossible to keep her in the room for much longer.  
”You know, from now on, Natalia and I are gonna share a bed...”  
”Obviously,” she said, in that precocious way of hers. ”Can I go paint now?”

I pinned the picture up on the wall above my nightstand, as a reminder, and I turn over slightly to look at it, without letting go of your hand. In it we're standing in a green field dotted with pink and purple flowers, you and her and me. Hand in hand. She is in the middle, with braids standing out like Pippi Longstocking's and with a million dollar smile. You are on her left, wearing a suit and your heart on your sleeve. I'm on her right, rolling my eyes or looking to the heavens, it's hard to tell. The sky is coloured blue all the way down to the horizon behind us, cause that's the way the sky looks. It doesn't just hang above our heads like a canopy, it's blue until something blocks the view of it. That's because planet Earth isn't flat but round. She's learned that in school.

Nothing is blocking my view. I can see everything so clearly now, even as I close my eyes yet again and put my arms around you, carefully, so not to wake you. I breathe in the scent of your hair and like so many times these last few weeks I can feel God's presence. This is a strange time in my life but God is with me and so are you. The sun is starting to rise outside but the house is still so silent I can hear an angel walking through our room.

**Author's Note:**

> There it is, the last fifty percent of my total fanfic production in English!


End file.
